Crisscrossing the country, our intrepid correspondent visits corporate labs, model living rooms, and actual sofas - to check out the megahyped interactive television prototypes and see just how real the 500-channel, all-digital, high-fiber future really is

By Evan I. Schwartz

It's lunch time on a Friday, and I'm working up an appetite, shopping on the television. I ain't watching no infomercial: I'm wielding an 8-inch remote at a GTE mainStreet marketing center - hard by Boston's Route 128 - controlling which products appear in front of me. The interface for GTE's mainStreet interactive TV service reminds me of the announcement boards on a local community access channel: low-budget graphics with Muzak in the background. Arranged in Hollywood Squares fashion on the opening screen are nine stylized photos, each representing a category, or "world," of activities. I've chosen world Number One: shopping, represented by a ribboned package. After blowing by screens that promote a virtual bookstore, a clothing boutique, and a flower stand,

I linger at the Flying Diner specialty foods storefront, where I'm beguiled by a glistening, 9-pound, honey-glazed ham.

I've got a hankering for that ham. With a twitch of my thumb, I guarantee that this great hunk-o-hog will arrive tomorrow.

Then, all of a sudden, the screen freezes - like a PC with a memory-protection error.

This is how my bumpy cross-country tour of America's interactive television test towns began. My travels took me to corporate labs, model living environments, and real suburban sofas near cities such as Boston, Seattle, Orlando, and Washington, DC - a sampling of the places where the biggest telephone, cable, and entertainment companies have been setting up technology trial zones. I wanted to see for myself what's been billed as television's true destiny.

Perhaps, I thought, I would learn the truth about the 500-channel, all-digital, high-fiber world of the future. Will it be a happy time, bursting with "choice, control, and convenience," the mantra of every corporation getting into this business? Or will we take one look at it, snort, and go right back to reruns of Baywatch? For that matter, will it even happen? Will you want to "turn your living room into a mall," as the Time Warner brochures promise? Or are so many industries rushing to make television interactive for the same reason that dogs lick their balls - because they can?

With that thought in mind, I identified my quest: ignore the insider industry positioning and regulatory battles and get answers to the basic questions: Exactly what is interactive TV? What do people say they want from the experience, and what do they really want? What types of services will they pay for, and how much will they pay? Does interactive cable have staying power? Or will the personal computer end up with all the interactive goodies in the end? The answers to these basic questions will determine whether the New TV will be a multibillion-dollar bonanza or the biggest business boondoggle since New Coke.

The first home on the expedition is just a few miles from my digs in Boston. I arrive during prime time on a Tuesday at a two-family walk-up in Watertown, a smack-dab-in-the-middle-class community that borders Cambridge and happens to host the largest concentration of Armenians in the country. The residents, Seda and Dikran Kaligian, 29 and 33, live in a small apartment with classic movie posters on the walls and toys for their 10-month-old son on the floor. Recently, they got a call from Continental Cablevision, their cable company, which is helping GTE sell mainStreet as a premium service. "It sounded interesting, and I wanted to see what all the talk of interactive TV was about," Seda explains, handing me a cup of tea and inviting me to sit on a low-lying cloth sofa.

Turns out, the Kaligians were in the market for something interactive. They recently canceled Prodigy for their Macintosh because it was too slow. Actually, mainStreet isn't all that different. Like an online service, mainStreet ties up a phone line, this one jacked into the back of a special set-top box. The "upstream" signals from the remote travel over the phone line to GTE's central computers. Those computers then pump the programming "downstream" over GTE's fiber-optic rivers, which lead into Continental's regular coaxial cable offshoots and back into living rooms like this one. As such, the images appear much more quickly than they do on a PC with a modem - making mainStreet a kind of Prodigy with
pictures.